I changed my macOS system language to German, with the intent of getting more exposure to it.

One negative side effect is that most binaries I execute with my shell (for example: git) are now outputting German text as well1. In hindsight, this should have been expected.

A simple fix is to override the environment locale with English. I made the following addition to my dotfiles:

# Force the system-wide language to English.
# Both "en_US" and "en_CA" work here.
# We could also optionally set LC_ALL but it is not necessary.
# Verify current locale settings with `locale`.
export LANG="en_US"

  1. You could argue that it’s actually desirable to have terminal applications output German. However, nothing beats the standardization, consistency and familiarity of English for developer tooling. If I really need to have this extreme exposure one day, it’s always possible to just unset LANG. ↩︎